Goethe's Secret Revelation

Schmidt Number: S-1954

On-line since: 15th October, 2012

PART TWO

THE RIDDLE IN FAUST

(a) Exoteric
(b) Esoteric

Two Addresses given 11nth and
12th March, 1909, at Berlin

(a) EXOTERIC

It was in August, 1831, that Goethe sealed up a packet and
handed it to his faithful secretary Eckermann and prepared his
testamentary directions for the editing of this sealed-up treasure.
This packet contained in a comprehensive way the whole
striving of Goethe's life. It contained the second part of Goethe's
Faust; which was not to be published until after Goethe's death.
Goethe was aware that in this work he had given the contents of his
rich, many-sided, far-reaching and deeply-penetrating life to human
existence, and the importance of this moment for him may be
gathered from the words he uttered at the time, ‘I am now
finished my life's true work, anything I do further and
whether I do it or not, is all the same!’ If we permit a fact
such as this to work on the soul we can say: It would not be easy
for a human life to become fruitful for the rest of humanity in a
more beautiful, harmonious way, or indeed to become fruitful in a
more conscious manner. There is something deeply affecting in the
thought of Goethe's life at this point of time — for he lived
barely one year longer — in that he should have
visited Ilmenau once more and there re-read the beautiful verse he had
written on the 7th of September, 1783, when he was still a
comparatively young man.

‘Above all heights
Is rest,
In the tree tops
Thou feelest
Scarce a breath,
The birds are silent in the woods,
Only wait, soon
Thou too shalt rest.’

One may well ask whether these lines may not have signified
at that time a frame of mind regulating Goethe's ideas in a new way
as he re-read them in the evening of his life with affecting
tears.

Goethe's Faust is truly a testament of the very first order
when considered with reference to its literary and intellectual
standpoint.

In 1831 Goethe finished the work which had occupied him
from his earliest youth, having worked energetically from the
year 1824 at the second part of Faust. We find that Goethe knew
from the beginning of 1770 that he had what may be called the Faust
disposition and that he began in 1774 to write down the first part
of Faust, returning again and again to this poem in the most
important moments of his
life.

Notably he took the first part of Faust with him when he
went to Weimar and owing to his position there entered the great
world. Certainly it was not produced there. But because one
of the Weimar Court ladies, Fräulein von Göchhausen, preserved a copy of the Faust which Goethe took with him to
Weimar, we to-day possess the form in which it was when he took it
there. We therefore know the form in which Faust was printed for
the first time and published in 1790, and further we know the
setting in which the whole of Goethe's works appeared in 1808 in
the first edition. All that we have of Faust, including that very
important document which Goethe left as his testament, shows
us the different stages of Goethe's growth. It is endlessly
interesting to observe how these four stages of Goethe's
Faust-creation appear to us in different ways, according to
its inner nature, and how they represent a crescendo in the whole
of Goethe's life-endeavour. What Goethe took with him to
Weimar is a literary work of a quite personal character into
which he had poured the feelings, the degrees of knowledge and also
the despair of knowledge, as they went with him through the
Frankfort time into the Strassburg time and also into the first
Weimar period. It is the work of a man hotly striving after
knowledge, striving to feel himself into life, experiencing every
despair that an upright honourable man can go through, and all this
he had poured into this work. All this is in the first part of
Faust. But when Faust appeared in 1790 as a fragment, it was
recognized that Goethe had worked at it and transformed it out of a
longing lying deep in his soul and inner life which had become
enlightened through his contemplation of Italian nature and of
Italian works of Art. Out of this personal work of one who had been
tossed to and fro in life's storms there emerged the work of one,
who to a certain degree, had become unshackled and who had a very
clear view of life before his
soul.

Then came the time of Goethe's friendship with Schiller.
The time when in his inner being he learned to know and experience
a world which had long become rooted within him. A world of which
one can say that he who experiences it has had his spiritual eyes
opened, so that he can see into the surrounding spiritual world.
And now Faust's personality becomes a being placed between two
worlds, between the spiritual world to which man can raise himself
through purification, through the ennobling of himself and that
world which drags him down. Faust becomes a being placed
between the world of good and the world of evil. And while
previously we saw in Faust the life of the single striving
personality, now we see before us a great conflict carried on
between the good and evil powers around man. Man is thus placed in
the centre as the worthiest object for which the good and evil
beings fight in the world. Though in the very beginning Faust is
seen as a man doubting all knowledge, he now comes before us as one
placed between heaven and hell. Thus the poem reaches an
essentially higher stage and a higher
existence.

In the form in which Faust appears in 1808 it seems as if
thousands of years of human development resound. We are
reminded of the great dramatic representation of man's life
produced in ancient times in the Book of Job, where the evil spirit
went among men and stood up before God, and God said to him:
‘Thou hast been to and fro on the earth, hast thou considered
my servant Job?’ What is here said we find in the poem,
‘The Prologue in Heaven’ where God speaks with
Mephistopheles, the messenger of the evil spirituality:

THE LORD:

Know'st Faust?

MEPHISTOPHELES:

The Doctor Faust?

THE LORD:

My servant, he ――

So out of what Goethe wrote in order that his
Faust Mystery should appear in its right light there sounds an
echo of the Book of Job, ‘Dost thou know my servant
Job?’

Then Goethe's fine, full life continued further, going ever
deeper into the human existence of which the world to-day knows so
little. And having brought to expression in many different ways
what he had experienced in his soul, in 1824 he looked back
on his whole life, and once more sat down and described Faust's
passage through the great world, but in such a way that the second
part is a complete character picture of the inner human development
of the soul.

Looking back to the first part we can see how
completely true to life and to the reality of life is this
description of a striving soul. Everything that meets us in the
first part, especially in the beginning, is full of deep truths
regarding nature, but much in it resembles a kind of theory
of art — as if someone spoke of things that his soul had not
yet fully
experienced.

And the second part: Here everything is the inward
experience of his own soul. Here are the highest experiences
of a spiritual kind by means of which man climbs the stages of
existence, passes through the physical world and penetrates to the
place where the human soul is united with the spirituality of the
world, dissolves together with it and knows wherein it finds peace
and at the same time that which gives freedom, dignity and
self-dependence. All this is given in the second part of Faust as
his own inner experience. The time will come when Goethe's Faust
will be understood in quite another way from what it is to-day,
when people will understand what Goethe wished to say when he said
to Eckermann on 29th Jan., 1827: ‘All in Faust is of the senses,
material, thought out in terms of the theatre to please everyone and I wished for nothing
more than that. If the crowd of onlookers takes pleasure in its
appearance, the higher meaning will not escape the observation of
the initiated.’

Though the first part in many ways appears to be
theoretical and not worked down into life, the second part is one
of the most realistic of those pieces of world literature which go
most deeply into reality; for everything in the second part
of Faust is experienced, though not with the physical eye, because
to have such experiences, spiritual eyes and spiritual ears are
necessary. It is for that reason that the second part of
Faust has been so little understood. People merely saw symbols and
allegories in what is for the spiritual inquirer, who can
experience it in the spiritual worlds, something far more true and
real than anything that can be seen with the outer physical eyes or
heard with the outer physical ears. From such a work we can promise
ourselves much, and the task of the lectures to-day and to-morrow
will be to consider something of what lies in it. To-day we will
consider the matter more from the outer side, but to-morrow we will
show how Goethe's Faust poem, in the true meaning of the word, is a
picture of an inner esoteric life and intuitive vision of the
world. Step by step we will endeavour to penetrate into that which
is within and to look behind the curtain where the deepest secrets
of Goethe's life lie
hidden.

The Faust mood was in Goethe even when he was a student at
Leipzig, and we know that at that time he had a very serious
illness, bringing him very near death. Much that a man's soul can
grasp at such a time passed before Goethe, but many other things
had already preceded this. He had learnt to know the way in which
outer science looked at life. Certainly he had troubled himself
very little about his own profession at Leipzig, but had occupied
himself with many other sciences, more particularly with natural
science. A strong faith never left Goethe that it would be possible
to look into the deeper secrets of life through natural science;
but at Leipzig at that time he stood full of despair before all
that an outer knowledge could give him, in many ways a mere jumble
of ideas and disconnected observations of nature. Nowhere
could he find what he had already looked for as a boy, when at the
age of seven he took a writing desk, placed on it some minerals and
other geological products and plants, a wax taper and a burning
glass. Then waiting for the morning, as the first rays of the sun
came in, he took the burning glass, let the sun rays fall through
it on to the wax taper and in this way lighted a fire on the altar
which he had erected to the ‘great God’ of Nature, a
fire which should have come from the foundation and source of life
itself. But how far away were these sources of life from what
Goethe met in the different branches of knowledge of the High
School (Hoch-Schule),
how far these ‘sources of life’ were removed
from all such striving!

Goethe then went to Frankfort and came into touch with
thoughtful, sensible men who possessed above all things through
their developed soul life, something of the flowing together of the
human inner life with the spiritual weaving and living in the
world; men who in the fullest meaning of the word, felt in
themselves what Goethe expresses in the words: ‘The self in
them expands to a spiritual universe.’ At that time at
Frankfort he had the feeling, ‘Away from the mere striving
after ideas! Away from the merely perceptive sense observation!
There must be a path to the sources of existence!’ and he
came into touch with what one can call alchemistic, mystical and
theosophical literature. He himself attempted the practice of
alchemy. He relates how he came to know of a work through which
many sought for similar knowledge at that time, Welling's
‘Opus Mago-Cabalisticum et Theosophicum.’
This book was much thought of then as giving a
knowledge of the sources of existence. Goethe studied by degrees
Paracelsus, Valentinus and above all a work which from its whole
method must have produced a deep impression on all those who strove
after such knowledge,
‘Aurea Catena Homeri.’
This was a representation of nature the Mystics in the Middle Ages
believed to see. The study of these mystical, alchemistic,
theosophical books must have had a similar effect on Goethe
to that which a man striving to-day after the same things would
experience if he took up the books of Eliphas Levy or any other
thinker on the same lines. Indeed at that time these things must
have had an even more bewildering effect upon Goethe because
these different writers no longer really understood the
magic, theosophy, etc., of which they wrote. It was impossible to
speak in direct way of the real grandeur and meaning of these
things, proceeding from an ancient wisdom which had lived in human
souls, for the meaning was hidden under an outer garb which
included all kinds of physical and chemical forms. For those who
merely saw what appeared outwardly in these books it was the
greatest nonsense, and at that time it was most difficult to
penetrate behind these secrets and arrive at the real meaning. But
we must not forget that Goethe from his deep striving for knowledge
had developed an intuitive mind. He must have been greatly pleased
when on opening the ‘Aurea Catena Homeri’
he saw on the first page a symbol which had a deep
effect on his soul; two triangles interlaced; in the corners
the signs of the planets, drawn in a wonderful way, a flying dragon
wound round in a circle, beneath which another dragon had fixed
stiffening itself, and when he read the words on the first page,
saying that the flying dragon symbolizes the stream which
sends those forces which stream down from out of the Cosmos to the
stiffened dragon, showing how heaven and earth hang together, or as
it is expressed there: ‘How the spiritual forces of heaven
pour into the earth's centre.’

These mysterious signs and words must have made a great
impression upon Goethe. For instance, those which depict the whole
growth of the earth: ‘From chaos to that which is called the
universal quintessence’ — a remarkable sentence,
curiously mixed up with signs of a chaotic nature, still
undifferentiated right through the mineral, plant and animal
kingdoms, right up to man and to that perspective to which man is
developing in ever greater refinement. But it was not easy to find
a way of penetrating to the deeper meaning. So Goethe left
Frankfort in a frame of mind which can be described in the
following words: I have found nothing. These seekers into nature
can only give me dry, empty ideas; anything that can be squeezed
out of them is but life's water. I have busied myself with much
that has come down to us from the past from those who declare that
they saw into the secrets of life. But the way, the way drives one
to despair!

This was sometimes the mood in Goethe's soul. He was not to
be bewitched by easy speculations or philosophizing, or by confused
symbols and explanations from those old books, which worked
so wonderfully and forebodingly on him. They looked at him
with their mysteries as something to which he could find no way.
But anyone who knew Goethe's soul, knew the seed was already sown
in his soul which was to germinate later. But he felt himself as
one who was rejected and unworthy to unravel the secrets of life.
Then he went to Strassburg.

There he met people who must have interested him in one way
or the other. He got to know Jung-Stilling with his deeply mystical
soul, who owing to the development of peculiar forces
generally found sleeping in men, had looked deeply into the hidden
side of existence. He met Herder at Strassburg, who had gone
through similar moods and who in times of desperation had often
been at the point of a denial of future life. In Herder he learnt
to know a man who suffered from a surfeit of life and who said, I
have studied much, discerning sundry things connected with
men's works and men's strivings on the earth. But he was unable to
say to himself, I have had one moment when my longing after the
sources of life has been satisfied. This was when he was ill and
inclined to deny everything with bitter irony. Yet it was
Herder who pointed out many depths in the riddles of life, and
Goethe found in him a truly human Faust. But that side of negation
which is not the outcome of mockery and scorn Goethe learnt to know
later through his friend Merck. Goethe's mother who disliked
criticism of people and all moralizing said of Merck, he can never
leave Mephistopheles at home, in him we are quite used to it. In
Merck Goethe found a disclaimer of much that is worth striving for
in life. Over against all these impressions which Goethe received
from the Strassburg people, it was through Nature and his observation
of Nature that many of life's puzzles were cleared up for him.

At the same time we must think of Goethe as a man possessed
of a sharp, penetrating mind; he was not an unpractical man. He was
an advocate, but only practised for a short time. Those who
knew Goethe's work as an advocate and later as a Minister, were
acquainted with his eminently practical mind. As advocate he knew
little more than what he had learnt by heart from law books. But he
was a man able to decide very quickly on any point laid before him;
such a man can also map out clearly life's course.

So Goethe comes before us with, on the one side, faculty
for the clearest thinking with relation to the world; and on the
other, for feeling in the deepest way the sorrow attached to an
unsatisfied pursuit of knowledge, seeking for the deepest
things and yet defeated by them.

And then there came something else. Goethe had learnt to
know that frame of mind which we can only characterize as the
feeling of guilt! He felt guilty in respect of the simple country
girl, Friederike at Sesenheim, in whose soul he had awakened so many hopes
and desires and whom he had all the same to forsake later. All this
was mixed up in Goethe's soul in the most remarkable way and out of
these feelings there grew within him a poetic figure, which had its
rise in the perception of a form which at that time followed him
step by step. This was the figure of Faust, that remarkable
character who had lived in the first half of the sixteenth century.
This Faust had been the object of innumerable folk-plays and
pantomimes and through Christopher Marlowe had reached a literary
significance and had become a living problem for poets, especially
for Lessing and Goethe. How did it happen that Goethe connected his
own sorrow and his own feelings with this figure of Faust?

It is related that Faust lived in the first half of the
sixteenth century, at a time when for history much had been
decided. If we compare this time with the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, when studious lives were led, we find a great
difference. In the twelfth century it was possible for those minds
to unite the knowledge of what the times offered them with what
they could find in their own souls. When they raised their
spiritual vision to the creative power of the world, enthroned in
the heights, and out of it formed their ideas, they were able to
unite them with what they had learnt to know through external
Natural Science. What they learnt was like a natural process. On
the lowest step they studied what they called physical knowledge,
on the next step they learnt to know what was taught of the higher
mysteries of life, the hidden mysteries of existence, which could
be reached through the spiritual eye and the spiritual ear; and on
the highest step they reached to the recognition of the sublime,
through ideas which were fine and transparent as crystal, but full
of life, and working powerfully on the soul. These were the steps
to the divine knowledge and were all connected with each
other. Man may shrug his shoulders and look down on the minds of
that time, but their way was one which never suffered intermission.
If for instance we take up the ‘Way of Knowledge’
by Albertus Magnus, we find it begins with a description of the lowest
part of nature and ends in a vision of God. You find here no dry,
empty ideas, but ideas which enlighten the heart and warm the soul.
When Faust lived this time had passed. Ideas then became dry and
empty; though they had the stamp of the theologian, they were
abstract or drawn from thought. They were ideas which could be
studied by men and into which the reasoning of the understanding
could sink, but no connection could be found by reason between
these ideas and the living existence lying around us, or any
possibility of enlightening the soul or bringing warmth to the
heart. And then it came to this, that the science of that time
— a mysticism, a magic, a theosophy, treating of things which
are only to be perceived through spiritual eyes and spiritual ears
— was caught in a complete decline, chiefly because much that
was previously hidden in handwriting, was now published in print,
and thus read by minds understanding nothing of it and who merely
copied it. Humbug and nonsense of all kinds went on in the
laboratories. What should have been experienced in a spiritual
manner, was understood merely according to the words appearing in
the books, although they were really only an outer form, but
possessing a very deep meaning. Through formulae and retorts all
kinds of stuff was made, with the result that what at that time was
called theosophy, magic and the occult, came very near to being
what we should now look upon as swindling and
imposture. In a certain sense the way to the spiritual is connected with
danger. Those whose striving has not been honest, whose
understanding and reason has not been purified, who are unable to
arrive in thought at ideas freed from the physical, may easily
stumble and easily fall into the abyss. Therefore it was possible
for those who still knew something or who studied the writings of
the mystics with great pains, to miss the way and being unable to
find it to be deceived by the swindling and charlatanism then
prevalent. But it could also happen that the opposite view was
taken by many people. This striving for higher things was denounced
as witchcraft, and men such as
Sponheim,
Agrippa von Nettesheim
and many others who sought honourably and
blamelessly for the spiritual forces in nature, were branded as
black magicians and swindlers, as men who had quitted the right
path given them through religion. Faust lived during this time in
the sixteenth century, a time when many saw the setting of an old
spiritual movement as a rosy evening which at the same time became
the rosy dawn of a new time bringing out such stars as Giordano
Bruno, Galileo, Copernicus and others. Such times are called
periods of transition. But of all these periods, none deserves the
name so much as the time of Faust.

From what we know of Faust he appears as one who felt very
deeply the insufficiency of the knowledge of that time concerning
the spiritual world. Theology he had studied and had turned away
from it. He sought for the sources of existence from the mediaeval
remnants of magic and similar things from the Middle Ages; and
because Faust was a brilliant figure oscillating between an
honourable striving after knowledge and those limits which passed
over into charlatanism, it is better to consider him in this way
and not attempt to understand him with sharper outlines. As he
really was, the spiritual tendency at that time failed to
understand him, and the general popular striving of the time
was regarded as the outer garment of this Faust-figure in the
sixteenth century. So he meets us as a legendary figure or
dramatically as a man fallen away from the old traditions of
religion and theology, who had given himself up to an endeavour,
which owing to the narrow-minded ideas of that time could not
possibly lead to any good in life. The opinion of the world between
the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries is expressed in the
words from a popular book of that time on Faust: ‘He has for
a time put the Holy Scriptures behind the door, and laid them under
the bench, and wishes to hear no more of Theology, as he has become
a man of the world and calls himself a
D. Medicinæ.’

What was felt and thought about Faust was expressed
in such words. It was felt that he sought in his own breast for the
source leading to the depths of life and his own origin, and that
he wished to free himself in his own way from the old traditions.
Anything in the old folk-plays or pantomimes referring to
this figure of Faust was little adapted to give more than his
outward appearance. But all that had remained as the tradition of
Faust influenced Goethe, and he entrusted to this character his
life's striving and his urgent desire for knowledge. So we find him
in his 70th year beginning to see himself in the character of
Faust. In this character he expressed all the
dissatisfaction, and all the sorrow proceeding from the
desire for knowledge which remained unsatisfied. And when we look
at the first monologue in ‘Faust’ we see clearly what
was described at the beginning of to-day's lecture. We see a man
who having occupied himself deeply in outer science had reached a
state of despair which threatened to shatter his life completely.
We see how he seizes on the old book — Goethe called it the
Book of Nostradamus, but anyone acquainted with the literature of
magic also known to Goethe, will clearly recognize the book to
which he referred — in which Faust perceived the sign of (lie
macrocosm and of which he says:

‘Like heavenly forces rising and descending,
Their golden urns reciprocally lending,
With wings that winnow blessing
From Heaven through Earth I see them pressing,
Filling the All with harmony unceasing.’

Faust,
Scene I.

and then added to these words a description of feeling, a kind of
rapture that passed through him at the sight of this page.

Through all this we see what at that time worked on Goethe.
It was possible for such moods and ideas to flow into Goethe's
soul, that he could truthfully describe them. When he stood before
the remarkable sign of the two interlaced triangles and the two
dragons — the upper one representing the spiritual and the
lower one the physical — with the signs of the planets in the
corners of the interlaced triangles, such forces penetrated through
them that he really had the shining planets before him as the
golden urns, with the forces flowing between them and filling the
All with harmony unceasing.

When we consider Goethe's soul with its deep and honest
striving for knowledge, we begin to doubt whether it is possible to
have clear ideas or to speculate much about it. We can only try to
place the fact before our souls so that any feeling for such things
may be satisfied. But anyone understanding life and the way in
which it develops through age, knows that in spite of such battles,
Goethe was a man in whose soul a germ had been laid which would
ripen and bear fruit very much later, in years to come. We see too
how the germs which developed later so wonderfully in Faust were
really there, and much can be gained from the study of this life by
those who have a distinct leaning to spiritual science.

To-day unfortunately such striving is very
superficial. We see many people taking it up in a hurry, but
they drop it again after having acquired a few ideas. The riddles
that exist are only known to one who can look back to a time twenty
or thirty years previously when a fluid was poured into his soul
and then stored over by the events of the following years and by
many experiences, so that only thirty years later he is able to
give an approximate answer respecting what was poured in his
soul so long before. From this point of view we cannot look too
deeply into Goethe's life. We see the echo of his feeling in
relation to the
‘Aurea Catena Homeri’
or ‘The Golden Chain of Homer.’ We see it expressed
when Faust breaks forth into the words, ‘What a show!’
Yes, a very powerful show, when the soul sinks deeply into these
pictures, without even a guess of what they will become in the
future. It is a show. But does it stop at mere guessing?

Then these words necessarily follow:

... but only a show! ...

At that time Goethe did not understand the deep meaning of
these words, but a shade of that feeling already lived in his soul,
for ‘All that is transient is but a semblance!’ and
having these remarkable pictures before him, he could say as if in
pain, ‘However artistically these characters are drawn,
they are but outer symbols!’

Each line is deeply felt: — only a show, something
which copies the great world. But Goethe had studied the many
problems of natural science and had learnt the deep experience
given to man, when he has to say to himself: ‘Thou art
guilty!’ Having experienced this, he could hope for more
depth of feeling on perceiving other signs closely connected
with man's life. This feeling is expressed by Faust: — The
book is turned over and in place of the sign of the great world,
there appears the sign of the little world, the pentagon, and its
surroundings. Then the magic word, which if rightly applied can
awake certain slumbering forces, appears before Goethe's soul.
Goethe certainly had a premonition that there is something,
characterized here as slumbering forces in man, and that through
gazing at certain symbols and images these forces could be
awakened, so as to make it possible for him to look into the
spiritual world. He could believe that he came into contact with
that which stands very near to man's soul and expresses itself in
the signs of the microcosm, the little world. He expresses this
through his ‘Faust’ when he says that if man gives
himself up to deeper inner meditation certain inner experiences
develop and the ‘earth spirit’ appears, that spirit
which quickens the earth and which sees to it, that out of the
general life and stream of the world man comes to be and increases.
Goethe understood in a marvellous way how to compress into a few
words what are the secrets of the earth spirit, and in what way he
belongs to the whole earth — just as each human soul and
human spirit is related to the physical body of man — who is,
we might say, the ruler of all the natural development, increase
and historical growth of man. This ruler has no visible form, but
can appear to a man whose spiritual eyes are opened, so that he can perceive
and know that there is such a spirit of the earth. Goethe has
characterized Him in a wonderful way:

Spirit:

‘In the tides of Life, in Action's storm,
A fluctuant wave,
A shuttle free,
Birth, the Grave,
An eternal sea,
A weaving, flowing
Life, all-glowing.’

‘Thus at Time's loom 'tis my hand prepares
The garment of Life that the Deity wears!’

If we could penetrate every word of this formula we should
find that what is described by Goethe, can be really experienced by
anyone whose development has brought his soul to the requisite
stage of existence. But all know what comes to pass: Faust does not
feel himself and cannot feel himself as developed to what thus
presents itself. He has not found the way to the secret depths of
life. What ‘flows in life and lives and weaves in action's
storm’ exists for him as a ‘terrible face.’ He
turns away and hears the words:

Spirit:

‘Thou'rt like the spirit thou comprehendest, Not me!’

Out of the old traditions he gained the belief that he was
the exact image of the Divinity, and now he had to say to himself,
‘Not even thee!’

‘Thou resemblest the mind thou canst
grasp.’ If only people could once feel this sentence! That it
was felt by Goethe can be seen from the whole situation in the
first part of ‘Faust.’ Man can understand nothing
beyond that point to which he has developed
himself.

On another occasion Goethe said, ‘As one is, so is
one's God,’ and this resembles a confession on Goethe's part,
that he had not, up to that time, found the way to the source of
life. A confession which he here connects with Faust. When we
consider Faust in this first form, we see what difficulties Goethe
had to contend with in order to connect his world with the
spiritual world towards which he was striving. We find in this
first ‘Faust’ immediately afterwards, and without any
real transition, the meeting of Mephistopheles with the
student.

What is Mephistopheles? Anyone who knows the way into the
spiritual world, knows that there really is a Mephistopheles, that
he is one of the two tempters who meet man when he desires to enter
the road to the spiritual land, when he seeks the way to the
spiritual world. There are two potencies or powers whom man meets.
One power we call Lucifer. He lays hold of man in a more inward
way, in the centre of his soul, seeking to drag him down through
his passions, desires, lusts, etc., into the lower scale of
the personal and ignoble. All that works on man himself is
Luciferic, and because man was once caught in his earthly life by
this Luciferic principle, he was delivered up to another principle.
If man had never been seized by this Luciferic principle, the outer
world would never have appeared to him in its merely material
outward form, but would have presented itself in such a way
that man could have said from the beginning that all outward things
were physiognomic expression of the Spirit. Man would have seen the
Spirit behind all physical material things. But because matter
became condensed through the influence of the Luciferic power
that which was false became mingled with (lie outer appearance, so
that its outward form seemed Maya or illusion, as if it were not
the outer physiognomic expression of the spirit. This power
presenting the outer world to the view of a man in an untrue form
was first recognized in its complete depth by Zarathustra. Under
the name of Ahriman, Zarathustra first presented this being as the
opponent of the God of Light. In everything connected with the
teaching of Zarathustra, Ahriman was the deceitful being, who hid
everything in mist and smoke which otherwise would have been
visible to man as a transparent, spiritual splendour. To express it
plainly, this being who caused the ruin of man, because he forced
him into the fetters of matter, and also deceived him about its
true form, was called Mephistopheles. This figure was called in
Hebrew, Mephiz, the spoiler, and Topel, the liar. This being passed
over into the West in the Middle Ages in the form of
Mephistopheles. In the books on Faust, we see as opposed to Faust
this Power, also called the ‘old
serpent.’

Goethe learnt to know this Mephistopheles. The later
traditions of Faust no longer distinguished properly between the
forms of Lucifer and of Mephistopheles. In the age following
the sixteenth century there was no longer a clear idea of these
forms. Men no longer knew how to distinguish between Lucifer and
Ahriman, and they united them in the form of the Devil or Satan;
and because nothing was known of the spiritual world, no particular
difference was made. But to Goethe, all that he received through
the outer senses, and through the human understanding, with its
physical instrument the brain, by which he gained perception of the
outer world, appeared to him as Mephistopheles. The man appealing
to these qualities of the ordinary understanding, was the same to
him as one who through the ego strove to enter the spiritual world.
So that for Goethe — as also for Merck or Herder — all
that appealed merely to the understanding is represented in a
wonderful way in the figure of Mephistopheles, who does not believe
in a world of the good, or consider it significant or important. In
Goethe himself was this second ego, which could be brought to a
state of doubt concerning the spiritual world, and sometimes he
felt in himself the discord caused by what we may call the
Mephistophelian power. He felt himself placed in conflict between
this evil power raging in his soul and the truly honourable
striving of his soul for the heights. Goethe felt both these forces
in his soul. But in what position to place himself with regard to
the spiritual world Goethe at that time did not know. He was a long
way from that experience which we find in the second part of
‘Faust’ in such a magnificent way. In the scene
‘The way to the Mothers’ we see the man striving
inwardly for the spiritual heights but detained by a deceptive
picture and captivated by reason of what Mephistopheles has placed
before him through trickery. Mephistopheles represents all that can
be found in outer physical science which is bound up with the
understanding. He stands there with the keys — this knowledge
is certainly good, for it leads to the door of the spiritual world.
— But within Mephistopheles cannot go. Therefore he
describes that into which Faust must go as a ‘nothing,’
And we hear from the words of Mephistopheles, spoken in a
classic, grandiose manner, what is thrown by the materialistic
minds of men in the face of those who are striving to discover the
foundations of life out of spiritual science. He says: ‘Thou
art a dreamer and a fantastic. We are not going to be taken in by
what such dreamers tell us about the spiritual foundations of
things. We care nothing for that!’ And the spiritual enquirer
can reply as did Faust to Mephistopheles, ‘In thy nothing I
hope to find the
all!’

But Goethe was experiencing that boisterous youth out of
which he had just brought Faust and was far from possessing at that
time such clarity of soul. He did not know then how to bring
Mephistopheles into touch with Faust, for Mephistopheles is there
in the original Faust as Goethe had experienced him as the power
that drags man down, and represented him as a mocker in the
‘student scene.’ Only later did Goethe find the means
for Mephistopheles by degrees to approach Faust though his changing
forms.

We find next that Faust is drawn by Mephistopheles and
falls into the abyss of sensuality in the scene in
‘Auerbach's wine cellar’ and the road begins down which
Faust is led to evil. The end of the ‘prison scene’ is
not given in the fragment which appeared in 1790; Goethe kept it
back, but this terribly affecting scene was in the first fragment.
It was in what we may call the tragedy of Gretchen that Goethe
placed that side of his life which can be expressed by the words
‘I am guilty.’ What Goethe expresses in the first part
of ‘Faust’ is the word
‘Personality.’

It was in that Goethe, who travelled to Italy, that a part
of the seed sown in his soul first began to develop. He found a
wonderful road during his Italian journey; it can be followed step
by step. He said when he wrote at last to his friends at Weimar,
‘So much is certain, the old artists had quite as great a
knowledge of nature and just as good an idea of that which we see
and the manner in which it should be seen, as Homer had.
Unfortunately the number of works of art of the first order is much
too small. But anyone able to see them, need wish for nothing
further than the right to recognize them and then go in
peace. These great works of art were produced according to true and
natural laws; the arbitrary, the fanciful collapses; here is
necessity; here is God!’ — ‘I have an idea
that the creators of these works of art acted according to those
laws which guide nature, and on whose tracks I am.’ He is no
longer the same Goethe who was full of an abstract longing, but is
filled with self-denial and resignation, ready to investigate
existence step by step along the road by which he hopes to discover
the problems of life
revealed.

It is not surprising if nothing is discovered of the great
spiritual aim of mankind, if it is only sought in an abstract way,
but which if sought for in the right way leads directly to the
highest problems of life. Those who have no inclination to compare
one plant with another, one animal with another, one bone with
another, or to consider life, step by step, as they go through the
world in order to find the spirit in each single being, in such
people an abstract longing will lead to
nothing.

Let us consider Goethe when during his Italian journey, he
gradually arrived at the discovery of the primeval plant, he
collected stones, prepared himself diligently to take up the work
of research, and did not seek to know immediately ‘how one
thing strives to enter another’ but said to himself:
‘If you would gain a premonition’ of ‘how one
thing works and lives in another’ as heavenly powers rise and
fall, offering each the ‘golden urn,’ examine the
vertebras of the spinal column and the way in which one bone is
connected with the next; and how one faculty helps another. Seek in
the smallest thing the picture of the
greatest.

Goethe became a very diligent student during his travels in
Italy, examining everything. He formed the opinion that if an
artist acted ‘according to the laws which are followed by
nature herself’ and understood by the Greeks, the divine will
be present in his works even as it is in the works of creation. For
Goethe, art is a ‘manifestation of the secret laws of
nature.’ The creations of the artists are works of nature on
a higher stage of perfection. Art is man's continuation and
conclusion of nature. ‘For since man is the head of nature so
he regards himself as a complete nature, but also as one which can
call forth a further rise. He strives for this through the
acquisition of all accomplishments and virtues which call for
choice, order, harmony, and meaning, and at last rises to the
production of the work of
art.’

We can say that during the Italian journey everything
that came before Goethe took on definite forms and through inner
soul experiences appeared clearly before him. So once again he took
up ‘Faust,’ and we perceive how he endeavoured to bring
the separate parts into union. But we also perceive how he
interested himself in an objective manner in what Faust could
become for the people of the North. In Italy he became particularly
conscious of the great difference between people who had been
brought up amid classical surroundings and those who had not. He
found it strange that so little should be heard in Rome of ghost
stories such as were common in the North. In the Villa Borghese he
wrote at this time the ‘Witches Kitchen’ scene, as one
who had lost touch with all such things, but also as one who
recalled to memory the spirit of the earth. When he had previously
written about the earth spirit, he represented it in such a way
that Faust turned away from it, as from a ‘hideous
worm.’ But the fact of turning away from it, even without
understanding why, remains in the soul and works on further, as it
did in Goethe. But those who become impatient and refuse to wait
until after long years the seed grows, are unable to see the way
clearly. And when in Italy Goethe knew that a turning away from the
terrible countenance would have its effect upon his soul, and now
these words arise:

‘Sublime Spirit, thou gavest me, gavest me all
For which I begged. It was not without reason
That thou didst turn thy face in fire to me
And for a kingdom gavest me the glorious nature
With strength to feel it and to enjoy it. Not
A coldly astonished gaze didst thou grant to me
But didst permit me to look into her profound bosom
As into that of a friend.
Past me didst thou lead the ranks of the living
And didst teach me to know, in the quiet bushes,
In air, and in water, my brother.
And when the storm roared and rattled in the woods
And there fell the neighbouring branches of the giant fir
Squashing the undergrowth and in their fall
Sounding like thunder in the hollow of the hills,
Thou didst lead me to a safe Grotto, where
Thou didst show me myself and opened my heart
To deep and secret wonders.’

Before Goethe, there stands the possibility of
the human soul, through its own development expanding to a spiritual
universe. Through a patient sacrificial resigned search, the fruits
stand before his soul which as germs were planted when he came into
touch with the earth spirit. We can see through this monologue in
‘Wald und Höhle’
(wood and grotto) what a forward jerk this was towards the
ripening of the fruits in his soul, for it shows us that the seed
already sown was not sown in vain. And as a warning to have
patience, to wait until such seeds had ripened in his soul, that
fragment of ‘Faust’ meets us which appeared with this
setting in 1790. And now we see how Goethe finds the way step by
step after being led to his ‘safe grotto where the secret
deep wonders of his own heart were opened to him,’ he obtains
that comprehensive survey which bids him no longer abide with his
own sorrow, but teaches him to rise above his sorrow, to send his
foreseeing spirit out into the Macrocosmos, watch the fighting of
the good and evil spirits and see men on their battle ground. And
in ‘Faust’ in 1808 he sent out beforehand the
‘Prologue in Heaven:’

Raphael:

‘The sun-orb sings, in emulation,
'Mid brother-spheres, his ancient round:
His path predestined through Creation
He ends with step of thunder-sound.’

We next see how the macrocosmic Mights oppose the forces of
the great world. We see too from out the experiences of Goethe's
soul, what a remarkable light falls on the two dragons with which
at one time in his youth he came in
touch.

‘Faust’ is such a universal poem
because it contains so many warnings. It also gives us that
golden saying: ‘Wait in confidence for the development of thy
inner forces, even if that means waiting a very long time!’
These words also sound as a warning which stand as an attribute
before Faust, when Goethe looks back to those ‘fluctuating
figures which in early days had once shown a troubled
countenance’ but which now are flooded with light. Now he had
waited so long that the friends who had taken such a vivid interest
in Faust as he had appeared to them in the first form, had died,
and those who had not died were very far away. Goethe had been
obliged to wait for the development of the seed already sown in him.

Now these striking words meet us:

‘My sorrow speaks to an unknown crowd,
Their applause e'en makes my heart feel heavy,
And those who once delighted in my song
If they still live, in other lands are scattered.’

No longer did it matter to those who in youth had felt with
him. He had had to wait, as the last lines of this dedication so
beautifully express it — ‘What was once a reality to
me, has gone into the unreal: but what has remained for me and
appears to outer vision as unreal, that to me is now true, and it
is only now that I can give it as truth.’ So we see how this
poem, even if only looked at in such an external manner as we have
to-day, leads us into the depths of the human soul.

‘Faust’ was begun in a desultory
manner, some parts being pushed in between others, and therefore
Goethe was unable to show in a continuous way what he had
experienced in his soul. But something else led to the fact that
Goethe expressed his deepest experiences in ‘Faust.’

The ‘Helena scene’ also belongs to the first
part of ‘Faust’ written by Goethe. But we find it was not included
even in the ‘Faust’ of 1808. Why not? Because the
manner in which Goethe had finished ‘Faust’ at that
time would not allow it. What Goethe wished to say through the
Helena scene was the expression of such a deep premonition of the
deepest riddle of existence, that the first part was not
sufficiently prepared to allow of this. Only when Goethe had
reached an advanced age, was he able to give a true form to what
really was the inner work of his life.

We see how his mind had expanded so that he was able to
grasp the worlds of the macrocosm, as expressed in the
‘Prologue in Heaven.’ We shall also see the way in
which Goethe represents the stages of the soul's experience,
leading men from the first stage up to that of imaginative vision,
where the soul penetrating ever deeper and deeper, bursts at last
the doors of the spiritual world, which Mephistopheles would close.
Goethe also represents these inner experiences. For he places in
the second part of ‘Faust’ the experiences of a soul
through secret scientific study, and we see here one of the deepest
riddles of existence, which if recognized, would be found to be an
announcement of Western spiritual science given in imposing
language. One is tempted to place such a poem as the
‘Bhagavad Gita’ and the second part of
‘Faust’ side by side. For great and powerful wisdom
speaks out of such Eastern writings. It seems as if the gods
themselves desired in them to speak with men to express the wisdom
out of which the world was formed. Indeed it is so.

Now let us look at the second part of ‘Faust.’
Here we see a striving human soul which has raised itself to
spiritual vision from outer physical perception; we see how it has
worked its way up to true clairvoyance when Faust enters the
spiritual world and finds the spiritual choir around him ...

‘Hearken! Hark! — The Hours careering
Sounding loud to spirit-hearing.
See the new-born day appearing!
Rocky portals jarring shatter,
Phœbus' wheels in rolling clatter,
With a crash the Light draws near!
Pealing rays and trumpet-blazes —
Eye is blinded, ear amazes:
The Unheard can no one hear!’

Faust II, Act I.

to that passage where Faust is outwardly dazzled, so that
the outer world is lost to his perception and he says to himself:
‘Only within shines clear light! ...’ up to that
passage in which the soul works itself up to the spheres of world
existence, where the spiritual worlds are to be seen in all their
purity, and the riddle of the world discloses itself to the soul.
This is a way which we must designate as an esoteric one.

The way in which we can penetrate from the outer to the
inner life of Goethe's world enigma, we shall see to-morrow, and we
shall also see from out of what depths Goethe spoke the word which
at last gave him the certainty he needed with reference to all the
longings, all the sorrows, pains and strivings for knowledge in his life.

‘Whoever zealously strives
We can redeem him;
And if love from above
Feels an interest in him,
The blest choir will be there
With a friendly greeting.’

We shall consider to-morrow how Goethe solved this riddle
of existence, and how that which lives in the soul can rise up to
its true home. It will give us the answer to what Goethe placed as
the riddle of his existence and about which he gives us such
a hopeful answer at the end of the second part of ‘Faust:’

‘For the spiritual world,
That noble member,
Is saved from evil.
Whoever strives zealously
We can redeem him! ...’

This tells us Faust can be saved and those spirits will not
conquer who by bringing men into the material bring them also to
destruction.